Science & Technology: Horn of Plenty or Snake in the Grass? (HyFlex: In-person)
Winter (14+ hours) | Available (Membership Required)
This is the in-person option for this HyFlex course!
Homo sapiens is the only life-form on planet Earth capable of developing a deep understanding of nature, matter, the cosmos, and the universe. Science is the process of gaining that knowledge and finding evidence of how everything works.
The roots of natural science can be traced back to ancient civilizations. There’s evidence of early observations of the natural world in places like Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece as far back as 3000 BCE. These civilizations observed the stars, developed medicine, and invented mathematics, laying the groundwork for what would become natural science. It is the scientific method that enabled us to find objective ways to understand nature and to weed out mistakes that were made on our journey of discovery.
We are living in a time when facts are replaced by “alternative reality,” amplified through the new media. In this course, through lecture and discussions, we will see how science can give us an objective worldview versus one based on myth, opinion, and misinformation. We also will examine the role that politics plays in making science the Horn of Plenty or the Snake in the Grass.
Jürgen Ewert
Jürgen Ewert grew up in a small village near the Baltic Sea in East Germany. After finishing school, he studied electrical engineering at the Technical University of Ilmenau, then worked as a design engineer at a large company in East Berlin, where he joined the Academy of Science in 1985. He had an opportunity to travel to the United States in August 1989, shortly before the Berlin wall fell that November. Jürgen lives in Woodstock, Vermont.